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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Band's, Bastards, and a bunch more.
- What We're Watching: Coming out, Oncle Antoine, Out of the Blue.
- Explore: Jesse Lerner and more.
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Roger Ebert finds that this lovely, modest film about an Arabic band stranded in Israel provides "an interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty." Michael Sragow calls it "a joyously bittersweet piece of visual music about isolation, melancholy and everyone's yearning for transcendence, through love, art or both." |
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Of interest now because of Quentin Tarantino's long-rumored remake, this wonderfully over-the-top, International 70s war flick arrives in an appropriately over-the-top DVD package that DVD Verdict calls "fantastic" with extras that "will be the real treat for genre fans." The film takes its cue from classics like The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape -- men on a mission -- and "is total testosterone overload. It's a boys' film that presents a pretty fantastic picture of war. Those raised on action films of a more recent vintage might find the limitations of this film quaint." More, from Variety. |
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Three coming out-themed films are reviewed together on Guru, including this one from Japan, which joins the coming-out parade with a sweet, fast-moving—and mostly intelligent—romance titled Love My Life, in which a daughter brings her girlfriend home to meet Dad and discovers… hey, I won't tell. What sets this frisky and maybe too-happy little film above the others is its insistence on probing ideas about family, sexuality and the uses of the closet. The kids shown here... read the review >> |
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There's a palpably thick layer of sadness and melancholy that envelops Canadian filmmaker Claude Jutra's Mon Oncle Antoine (1971). A lot of it has to do with the setting; it's Christmas Eve in a small asbestos-mining community in 1940s Quebec, nature is dressed in white, and the workers gather in the town's general store to celebrate the frozen and endless winter in an alcoholic stupor. But adding to the melancholy is the knowledge that, at the untimely age of fifty-six, Jutra decided to take his own life after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Nonetheless, as the case often is with films that feature kid protagonists (some obvious exceptions do pop to mind), Mon Oncle Antoine is also gentle, charming, and touching... read review >> |
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The miracle managed by Out of The Blue -- a New Zealand movie about a mass murder that took place there in the early 1990s -- is simply that it is not exploitative. While the film offers violence, suspense and shock, along with a bit of humor, it never "plays" its audience nor gives in to the sleazier impulses of so many current filmmakers to spin ugly thrills out of human misery. Yet, under Robert Sarkies' precise direction (he also co-adapted, with Graeme Tetley, the book on which the film is based), there is not an uninteresting moment in the whole endeavor. This... read review >> |
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Comic Booking
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